


And Let Perpetual Light Shine Upon Them

by englishable



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-23
Updated: 2019-12-23
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:07:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21916486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: Tatooine is a place where the sun takes a good long time to set, and therefore they are in no hurry to finish what they have come there to accomplish together. Burial in the desert is a complicated thing.
Relationships: Rey & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 21
Kudos: 137





	And Let Perpetual Light Shine Upon Them

…

There is a saying Rey heard once, about what the days on Tatooine are like – as long-lasting as a lie and as unsparing as the truth, as ravaging as despair and as hard as hope ~~–~~ but by the time they bring the Falcon down amidst the sand dunes the planet’s twinned suns have already begun to set.

Rey goes out first. Provisionally, with an austere limp the medics all say he will have for the rest of his life because the bones were cracked in four places by his fall, Ben follows her. His wine-dark robes luff like sails in the scorched wind; he hemmed them again three days ago, an acquiescence to D-O′s recently acquired habit of swerving silently but doggedly after him wherever he goes. Rey’s white scarf floats around her so that its ends catch the fading light. 

Their overlaid footprints form a single line through the streets of Mos Eisley and into the empty expanse beyond. 

Jangling music from the cantina fades behind them. The song drifting through its windows is apparently the only one Chalmun’s old band really knew, Ben tells her, and thus the new band is obliged to go on playing it, not that this is of any great consequence; the Corellian brandy they serve is so strong the average patron will have no coherent memory of the place anyhow.

Rey lags her stride by a half-step to keep pace with him. “You’re not speaking from experience, are you?”

“No,” Ben says. “It was two-thirds Corellian brandy and one-third Ipellaria firewater ~~–~~ my father recommended it.” He swallows to wet his throat. “I’ll buy you a glass of lachrymead on the way back.” 

This is the last thing he says for all the time it takes them to reach an outcrop of empty, sun-blasted stone buildings far out in the desert. Domed white roofs and cold chimney pipes stick up from the sand drifts.

Ben stops. It raises a scrim of dust.

Rey watches him turn a slow circle, his eyes searching and distant while the wind pulls at him from all four corners, until his face is due west towards those two lowering suns; she follows his gaze, in time to catch the transparent figures of a man and a woman in shining garments as they vanish, and then Ben gestures to the place beneath his feet.

“Here,” he says.

Rey kneels to smooth the sand flat with her palms. Three layers down it is cool and pale and clean, though ten feet below this Rey suspects it turns to shell-hard calcium caliche and that thirty feet down it turns to red clay. On Jakku, she recalls, proper custom – what little people ever observed of it – called for a funeral pyre made from spinebarrel roots, or else a sky-burial by the carrion crows that stooped down off their perches atop the high thermal columns and bore the body away in pieces; after Snoke’s death Rey had dreamed about the Pilgrim’s Road between Niima Outpost and the Sacred Villages, of walking it back and forth and back and forth to search for the unmarked, unnamed place where her parents might have been carelessly placed. 

But now she knows that they were nowhere, not even as bones under the shifting sands, and that the only piece she possess of them is the awful iron crown of a name they did not want to give her. A lump of anger leaves its bitter taste on her tongue. 

Ben stands opposite her, holding a twine-bound parcel. He unties it and kneels to reveal the two lightsabers set side by side.

He lays his hands over them; Rey rests her fingers atop his and they stay this way together for a long time. 

Ben sighs.

Slowly, with a sound like vespers being whispered by many voices at once, the sand falls away under their interlaced hands and the sabers sink out of sight. The grave fills again almost instantly, but Ben does not rise to his feet. Neither does Rey.

His next breath is hitched, tight around the sob lodged in his chest. The line between his brows sharpens. He blinks and something drips down his nose.

He bows so that his forehead is touching the dust and he weeps, leaving errant marks in the dry soil. Rey realizes she has been weeping for perhaps the last five minutes and pulls Ben closer so that his head is lifted into her lap; she shifts, folding herself over his curved back and resting a cheek against the warm folds of cloak between his shoulderblades.

They stay this way together for a long time, too, until there is the shaggy grunt of a pack animal and a circumspect cough.

They jolt up to find an old woman studying them.

“Oh, forgive me,” the woman says. “It’s been a good while since anyone came out this way. I should’ve guessed you two would want to be let alone.”

“Ah, no. It’s all right.” Rey swats dust from both her clothes and Ben’s as they stand; he, in turn, swipes the tears from both his face and hers. “We weren’t going to stay.”

“I see.” The woman squints. “And could I ask who you are, if you don’t mind? New faces have never been commonplace around here.”

“Ben Solo,” Ben says, without looking. 

“Ben, you said? Used to be we had a man around here who went by that same name, I think. Funny sort. Do you know him?”

“From a certain point of view.”

The woman swivels her head towards Rey. “And yourself?”

“Rey,” she says.

“Rey, who?”

Rey pauses. The red and white suns have dropped below the horizon while the clear air still holds their light. Ben makes one last ministering brush along her jaw and smiles at her. 

“Just Rey,” she answers. “Rey’s enough for now, I think.”

…


End file.
